Storytelling (2001)
10/10
wonderful painful
20 February 2002
Warning: Spoilers
Storytelling has two parts. Fiction and non fiction. In fiction Tod Solondz tells us how we have to watch part two, as soon as you start writing (filming in this case) everything becomes fiction. It is not surprising that the first part (fiction) seems to be more non-fiction than part 2 (non-fiction). The first part is the very raw and painful story about a young girl who is raped by her literature teacher. The second part is the story of a documentaire filmmaker who tries to make a film about teens in suburbia. The guy is a looser, and nobody believes his film will be succesful. But the family he follows (by accident) gets involved in a serie of dramatic events, and the film becomes a hit. When the filmmaker tells his subject he is sory for what happend to him, scooby tells him not to be sorry, because his film is a hit.

Tod Solondz is a genial storyteller. He doesn't follow the normal structure of a hollywood film, a protagonist with an dramatic purpose, an antagonsist with an invert purpose, ... Like the bad guy in part one tells us, the second story is way better, this one has at least a begin, a middle and an end. In fact Non-fiction has a begin, a middle and an end, but that is not the reason why you will like the movie. The dramatic events that will happen to the family livingstone are not the motor that makes this movie turn. As in happiness, it is the way Tod Solondz shows us how we really act in life, different than how we think we are acting. watching a Tod solondz movie is like when you watch yourself in the mirror early in the morning when you aren't completely awake. there is an ocean between where i live, an where tod Solondz films his movies, but everytime again, i see myself reflected in the personages of Tod Solondz. That is wath makes his films so wonderful painful, you see people doing stupid things, but you can't blame them, because you know you should do the same thing. You love the personages you are laughing with.

Well, i love Tod Solondz, in my directors all-time ranking i'll put him on the same level as lars Von Trier, just under Ingmar Bergman, and igmar bergman, that is the top.
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